Software for audio delivery and navigation

This paper describes a project to develop middleware for the navigation, authoring, storage and delivery of multimedia information. The project uses audio as a case study as it can be regarded as a document in a store-and-forward model or can be streamed like video. The work presented has focused on Java for its prototype distributed sound "viewer" for clients. The supporting network is using a modified Harvest Object Cache and specialized HTTP servers for delivery. The open hypermedia philosophy is adopted for navigation whereby information about links between multimedia documents is provided by a link service.